Am 19.04.20 um 21:16 schrieb Jeff Trull:

C++ exceptions are zero cost only when *not* thrown; keeping them out of critical paths can make a significant difference in performance.

Throwing exceptions is currently a routine part of the process of identifying concrete types for dispatching. When runtime is dominated by code strictly inside C++ this is not an issue, but for algorithms that must repeatedly cross the C++/Python boundary it can become a real performance problem. In particular, the search algorithms and their Visitors do this; I have found that using a non-throwing approach makes a dramatic speed improvement - over 2X for a maze router benchmark based on an implicit A* search.

I'm offering this patch <https://git.skewed.de/count0/graph-tool/-/merge_requests/24> as an implementation; I think it may be worth investigating if similar optimizations are available elsewhere in the code.

Thanks for this. The patch looks very good, and I'll merge it if testing does not dredge up anything, which is unlikely. Indeed the most typical case in graph-tool is that the exception is thrown only once, so the runtime cost is imperceptible. However, as you point out, this is not true for the visitor pattern in the search module, where the exception is thrown constantly. I've never benchmark this because I thought the exception throwing would still not be noticeable from the Python side of things, but it seems I was wrong. Thanks for noticing this, and for providing the benchmark! If there are any problems I will point this out via the gitlab interface. Best, Tiago -- Tiago de Paula Peixoto <tiago@skewed.de>